Install WordPress on Ubuntu 16.04

In this guide, you’ll learn to how to install WordPress on a Linode running Ubuntu 16.04. WordPress is a popular dynamic content management system focused on blogs. WordPress can be deployed on a LAMP or LEMP stack, and features an extensive plugin framework and theme system that allows site owners and developers to use its simple, yet powerful publishing tools.

Note

This guide is written for a non-root user. Commands that require elevated privileges are prefixed with sudo. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, you can check our Users and Groups guide.

All configuration files should be edited with elevated privileges. Remember to include sudo before running your text editor.

Replace each instance of example.com in this guide with your site’s domain name.

Make sure MySQL has a database set up for WordPress. If you do not have a WordPress database, create one:

Log in to the MySQL command line as the root user:

mysql -u root -p

Create the WordPress database:

CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

Create a user and grant them privileges for the newly created wordpress database, replacing wpuser and password with the username and password you wish to use:

CREATE USER 'wpuser' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wpuser';

Exit MySQL:

quit

Install WordPress

Create a directory called src under your website’s directory to store fresh copies of WordPress’s source files. In this guide, the home directory /var/www/html/example.com/ is used as an example. Navigate to that new directory:

Rename latest.tar.gz as wordpress followed by the date to store a backup of the original source files. This will be useful if you install new versions in the future and need to revert back to a previous release:

sudo mv latest.tar.gz wordpress-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`.tar.gz

Create a public_html directory to be the root directory for WordPress. Move the WordPress files to your public_html folder:

Configure WordPress

Visit your domain in a web browser and follow the steps shown onscreen. Select your preferred language, review the information page and click the Let’s go! button. Enter the database credentials that were set when you installed MySQL:

WordPress will test the credentials and if authentication is successful, prompt you to Run the install.

Note

If WordPress doesn’t display when you visit your domain, try adding /wp-admin to the end of the URL. This sometimes happens if you previously created an index file in your site’s home directory.

By default, WordPress will prompt you for FTP credentials when you install new themes or plugins. To bypass this, modify your wp-config.php file by adding the following lines:

/var/www/html/example.com/public_html/wp-config.php

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/** Bypass FTP */
define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

If you’re using Apache, run the following commands to ensure that mod_rewrite is enabled and then restart Apache to apply the changes:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2

To make changes to your site in the future, you can access the Dashboard of your WordPress site from the web interface by adding /wp-admin to your site’s URL: example.com/wp-admin.

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed WordPress.

Create WordPress Permalinks (Optional)

Permalink is a portmanteau of the words permanent and link. Permalinks are URLs that are automatically created for specific posts or pages in WordPress so that you or others can link to them. WordPress’s default settings assign post numbers as permalinks, meaning a link to a specific post would look like example.com/?p=42. To enforce a “prettier” permalink format, you’ll need to make a few adjustments to Apache or nginx.

Configure WordPress to Allow Permalinks on nginx

Direct nginx to check whether each permalink refers to an existing page. By default, nginx assumes that it doesn’t, and returns a server-side 404. Update the following lines in the location / { block in your virtual host configuration:

Install Optional PHP Extensions

WordPress, and many of its plugins, use PHP extensions that you’ll need to install manually. This section is optional, but it will allow you to access some WordPress features you may not have with a basic PHP installation.

In order to modify photos or images in Wordpress, you’ll need the PHP-GD extension. For example, when you upload an image to use as a header, you may need to crop the image to make it fit your page.

To install the GD extension:

sudo apt install php7.0-gd

For full non-English language support and to fix certain character encoding-related bugs, you’ll need the multibyte string (MBSTRING) extension.

These are only a few of the extensions you may find useful. Plenty of other PHP extensions exist and are required for certain plugin features, such as php7.0-curl, php7.0-xml, and php7.0-mcrypt. If you’re having issues with a plugin or widget, check its documentation to see if a PHP extension is required.

Note

The package names above assume you’re working with PHP version 7.0. If you installed PHP 5 from the Ubuntu repositories, modify the commands to use the php prefix rather than php7.0. For example, instead of installing php7.0-gd, use php-gd.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.